The Correlation Between Predatory Payday Lenders And Conservative Christians.

I will concede that I am generally very harsh towards conservative Christians for a couple of reasons. First, I vehemently oppose their efforts to merge their hate based version of religion into the civil laws. Almost all of the anti-gay discrimination in this country tracks back one way or another to religious belief. Second, so many of the conservative Christians are hypocrites and false Christians. Instead of caring for the poor and living the Gospel, they breed a message of hate towards all who are different and oppose policies that would better the conditions of the poor and marginalized. They are vocal in their opposition to abortion, yet largely missing in action when in comes to fostering programs and policies that make sure that children once born have decent health care and educations. There is a direct inverse correlation between the states in which they have political power and spending on social services and education. Likewise, they whine about gay marriage and the need to protect marriage and the family yet they support economic and social policies that that in fact undermine families.

Hence, it is no surprise to me that predatory pay day lenders thrive where the conservative Christians hold the most political sway as documented by a new story in Newsweek (http://www.newsweek.com/id/114407) - I urge readers to view the map in the article. It is totally in keeping with the Christianists' attitude of not giving a damn about most of the public and letting predators run free so long as anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage laws are on the books. For the last two years there have been efforts in the Virginia General Assembly to limit pay day lending in Virginia. Each year, the opponents to stepped up regulation has been from the Christianist dominated Virginia Republican Party. Here are some story highlights:

In a paper to be published this spring in the Catholic University Law Review, professors Christopher Peterson and Steven Graves find a surprising correlation between the geographic density of payday lenders and the political clout of conservative Christians. Newsweek’s Patrick Enright spoke with Peterson, visiting professor of law at the University of Utah, about their unexpected findings. Excerpts:

What's interesting and surprising to us is that we found a strong correlation between the number of payday lenders within a geographic area and the political power of conservative Christians within a state. It's a surprising result to us because the natural hypothesis would have been to assume that given biblical condemnation of usury, there would be aggressive regulation and less demand for payday loans in those types of states. I think it's ironic that we actually found that the opposite tended to be true. If you are someone that reads the Bible and takes that seriously, finding out that there's a disproportionate number of predatory lenders—usurious money-changers, depending on what you want to call them—in your flock, that's a significant fact, irrespective of the why.

Throughout the Bible Belt and the Mormon mountain West, there is relatively little regulation of this type of lending … That's clearly a causal factor. But in a sense that just begs the question: it's legal there, but why is it legal there? In 1965 every state in the United States, all 50 states in the Union, had traditional usury limits that capped interest rates generally from between 18 percent to about 42 percent annually … In the past 15 to 20 years many states have relaxed those limits, allowing payday lenders to come in and do business at interest rates that average about 450 percent. Why have those laws been relaxed? I think that part of the explanation is that the alliance between social-values conservatives and big-business conservatives was a big change in the balance of power with respect to consumer protection law or limits on usury.